Blizzard Announced Major Hearthstone Nerfs

Blizzard continues to make gameplay changes to Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, revealing upcoming changes that will drastically alter the game.

Blizzard has also shown that it understands card games are constantly evolving, causing the developer to quickly step in and make serious changes to Hearthstone when it feels the game's balance is being threatened by an over-performing deck.

That hasn't changed now that Hearthstone gets closer to its third year since open beta, so Blizzard announced that earlier this week couple of major nerfs are going to arrive for some of the game's most popular - and possibly broken - cards.

The biggest change suggested in the upcoming patch is being made to the card that Blizzard themselves have named the most controversial one ever created. Yogg-Saron, Hope's End has been a dominant presence on the tournament scene these past months, and right now Blizzard changed it so that if it dies in the middle of the burst of random spells it casts once played, it will cut off that sequence entirely.

Yogg-Saron often dies throughout the resolution of its ability, so this change will mostly affect the viability of the cars as a linchpin in tournament competitive decks. Blizzard will also shut down the tyrannical reign of Shaman aggro decks on the game's competitive ladder, nerfing both the Rockbiter Weapon and Tuskarr Totemic cards that made the deck so powerful since the release of Hearthstone: One Night in Karazhan shook up the meta.

Blizzard also made some changes to some of the cards from the game's Basic set to be less powerful, specifically Abusive sergeant and Execute. These changes, while perhaps not necessary immediately, were done so that Blizzard can being to design cards without worrying about the interactions with those two so much - the Basic set is always playable in Hearthstone, while other cards become unplayable in specific formats as time goes on.